This electoral train is from Whitehall to Town Hall, not stopping at County Hall!

As Angela Rayner announced to the Commons on Wednesday that she had decided to postpone the local elections in nine local authorities, opponents from across the political spectrum were eager to attack the plans. However, it was Reform UK who immediately stepped up their campaign rhetoric by urging electors deprived of a vote to support their campaign in other areas with donations and physical campaigning. Their petition to “save democracy” now has over 240,000 signatures and Nigel Farage has accused the major parties of “colluding” to cancel the elections because they are “scared of the rise of Reform”.

The 2025 elections were scheduled to provide around 20 million voters in England with an opportunity to vote and the latest news will see around a quarter of those voters miss out on their elections this year. Elections have been postponed in a total of nine authorities – seven counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Surrey, East Sussex, West Sussex and Hampshire, and two unitary councils in the Isle of Wight and Thurrock.

With 596 council seats no longer due to be contested, there is little doubt from any commentator that Reform stood to make gains in many of these areas, especially in counties such as Essex and Norfolk. However, the news is the latest part of the English Devolution plans, set out by the Government in December. In a surprisingly short timeframe, county councils and unitary authorities were granted 25 days to request to join the Devolution Priority Programme and ask the Government to cancel or postpone their scheduled elections in May. Eighteen councils made the request, and the 50% success rate has meant nine other councils having their request denied – Derbyshire, Devon, Gloucestershire, Kent, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Oxfordshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire.

Those that have seen their elections postponed have been successful in being added to the Devolution Priority Programme with six new Mayoral Strategic Authorities to be progressed in Cheshire and Warrington, Cumbria, Norfolk and Suffolk, Greater Essex, Hampshire and the Solent, and Sussex and Brighton.

Elections have been cancelled or postponed before, most notably during Covid and the foot and mouth outbreak, and governments have the power to amend the dates of local elections, although without a 15-month advance change, additional legislation has been required in each case. This time, local government reorganisation is the reason for postponing elections to authorities that will be replaced in the next year or two. Again, this is not new and local government reorganisation has shifted elections before. However, what is different this time is the top-down lead to force change rather than some of the previous locally-led requests that we have seen, and also that elections have been cancelled in the hope of a plan rather than because of it. The next steps for the six new proposed Mayoral Strategic Authorities include Government-led consultation in the next few weeks and agreement to proceed, plus funding deals agreed, by September. Although elections are envisaged in May 2026, it still feels like the local government jigsaw has been thrown up in the air, and we are not yet completely clear on where all the pieces are.

What will the delayed elections mean to the average voter? Probably very little! The county and district tiers of local government have never really been fully understood, and many voters don’t really know who is responsible for their roads, schools or libraries. In 2021, the turnout across county council elections was just over 36%, which suggests that for almost two-thirds of voters, a postponed election will have no impact whatsoever on their lives. 

For me, as a voter who has just had my election cancelled, I am not snapping pencils (short stubby ones of course) with frustration that I will be unable to go out and vote in May, nor is it the main chat in the local pub. However, the issue I do hear from local people is a sense of uncertainty about reorganisation – they’ve seen news headlines about council x merging with council y and services being merged, centralised or shared. There has been no consultation, no real flow of information to involve residents in the changes. There is now a good deal of confusion, invariably tinged with hope from those who live in a failing local authority, morphing into fear from those who live in a well-run local authority nervously eyeing up the misfortunes of their bankrupt local government neighbour. Ironically, while devolution is defined as the transfer or delegation of power to a lower level, especially by central government to local or regional administration, the sense from many people is that this is government centralisation wearing the cloak of devolution.

Politically, the main beneficiary of cancelled county council elections is the Conservative Party, starting from a hugely dominant base that saw them capture 66% of all county council seats in 2021. Compared to the 12% of seats that Labour won, there is very little space for Labour to have a bad night on May 1st but a massive risk that the Conservative headlines will be unhelpful to their recovery. So, why did Labour not leave the elections to run and potentially create more woes for Kemi Badenoch, as she works to resurrect the party from the crushing defeat of 2024? With Reform now topping a number of opinion polls, some commentators have suggested that a significant swing from Conservatives to Reform will ultimately have the greatest impact on Labour, so it is in their interests to halt the Reform march as much as they can. 

Local government reorganisation is a good thing (in my opinion), it should save money at a time when councils are contemplating buying national lottery tickets to fund their services next year. Countless attempts to simplify the multi-tiered council structures in England have only partially tackled the problem. But not all problems can be sorted by the hammer of Whitehall and developing a narrative and engagement from the ground up is critical if these proposals are going to capture the public imagination and their support. Likewise, strategic planning is welcomed by many, but that should be about redefining the relationship between state and citizen to create a sensible and fair system, not simply shifting the balance from one to another.

If this becomes a top-down devolution process, it may well be Nigel Farage who is left with the grin on his face when the votes are eventually counted, and I won’t even compare it to how well “Stop the Steal” worked for Donald Trump!